Assistant Leisure editor for the Voice Will Collins is back this week with some film suggestions: The Sessions starring John Hawkes and Helen Hunt and The Man with the Iron Fists starring Russel Crowe, Cung Le, and Lucy Liu.

“Will’s Reels” is back with assistant Leisure editor Will Collins bringing you advice on which movies to watch this weekend with your dad. 

We bring you the second part of a new series, “Will’s Reels,” where assistant Leisure editor Will Collins gives you advice on which movies to watch this weekend.

“The Dolphins of Shark Bay” had its American Premiere at Georgetown last night.

A packed room greeted the United States premiere of BBC documentary “The Dolphins of Shark Bay” in White-Gravenor.  The documentary features Professor Janet Mann, who splits her time between teaching in the Georgetown biology and psychology departments and studying dolphins at an isolated research center on the West Coast of Australia.  In Shark Bay, which is an UNESCO World Heritage site, Mann and her team study around 1600 dolphins. Read the rest of this entry »

Prepare yourselves, indie film geeks. The West End Cinema, a once-vacant theater located at 2301 M Street NW, will open on October 29.

The theater’s website, which launched this week, promises “art house, off-the-beaten-path kinds of films.”

During it’s opening weekend, the theater will screen Howl, an Allen Ginsberg biography starring James Franco; Budrus, the story of a Palestinian community that unites to save its village; and Gerrymandering, a documentary about the political and electoral outcomes of census taking. On Halloween weekend, the theater will host a midnight screening of Let Me In, the American adaptation of the Let the Right One In.

During the theater’s opening weekend, the directors of Budrus and Gerrymandering will also join audiences for question and answer sessions.

West End Cinema will offer discounts to seniors ($9), students ($9), military ($8), and children ($8). General admission tickets will cost $11, while matinee tickets will cost $8.

The third installment of Michael Bay’s Transformers series will be filming in D.C. soon—and you can be a part of the movie!

The District’s Office of Motion Picture and Television Development (MPTD) posted that the film’s producers are looking for extras for the various D.C. scenes. All it takes to apply is an e-mail, so why not send in an application? (Aside from the fact that the Transformers movies are cinematic schlock.)

Although the Transformers crew was scheduled to film in D.C. for three weeks, the National Park Service issued enough location denials that it was cut down to three days of filming.

MPTD head Kathy Hollinger told TBD that the National Park Service was the most challenging federal agency to work with, blocking requests to film at locations including the Washington Monument. However, the NPS allowed the crew to film at the Lincoln Memorial. [Editor's Note: If the Lincoln monument is a robot, we will cry.]

Shooting will occur during the week of September 27.

An independent movie theater is set to open in the West End this fall, according to the West End Flyer.

The Inner Circle triplex will reopen as the West End Theater at 2301 M Street NW, according to Josh Levin, who recently leased the sub-ground level property.

Levin, a film producer and distributor, plans to replace the three theaters’ seats and drapes, remodel the bathrooms, and install new light fixtures.

When the West End Theater opens, it will screen “first-run independent films, art house, documentary, and remastered classic films.”

Read the rest of this entry »

No one playing a word association game would think “hotbed for cinematic creativity” if someone said “Georgetown University.” Not that that’s a fair stereotype—even the School of Foreign Service graduated the amazing Carl Reiner (SFS ’43). But whether you’d expect it or not, two Georgetown graduates—including one SFSer—produced documentaries that debuted at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which finished up earlier this week.

And for his part, Nick Shumaker (COL ’01) was partially inspired by what he studied at Georgetown. He’s had a passion for ‘separatist religions’ since he studied Theology at Georgetown, he told the Voice, which played well into his production, American Mystic. The film, whose trailer you can view above, follows three young Americans as they explore alternative religions in rural parts of the country—Chuck, a Native American sundancer, Morpehus, a pagan priestess, and Kublai, a Spiritualist.

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On Monday night, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista came to Georgetown to screen Nine Days that Changed the World, the documentary film that portrays Pope John Paul II’s nine-day trip to Communist Poland in June 1979. The event, hosted by the Catholic Student Association and co-sponsored by the College Republicans, was protester-free, despite the worries that some students waiting in line expressed that the event would be a repeat of the disrupted General David Petraeus event.

Newt and Callista Gingrich narrate the movie, which documents how Pope John Paul’s visit transformed Poland and led to the eventual overthrow of communism. According to its website, the film “is a story of human liberation, revealing the extraordinary power of Pope John Paul II’s worldwide message of freedom through faith.”

Still, protests seemed to be on everyone’s mind, with Kevin Preskenis, the chief of staff of the College Republicans, obliquely referring to the Petraeus protest and calling this screening a “chance for all of us to unite as a Catholic university,” in his introductory remarks. Co-president of the Catholic Student Association Melinda Reyes welcomed the audience to the “non-partisan event.”

In his remarks, Newt Gingrich urged those who enjoy the film to promote it both by word of mouth and social networking sites so it will reach a wider audience.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Eclipse, a lauded indie Irish flick that debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, just opened in D.C. this past week. And apparently, it’s not without some local influence.

According to the Washington Examiner‘s Yeas & Nays blog, director Conor McPherson embellished the plot, which was supposed to be about a love triangle at a literary festival, by adding ghosts to the story after he made a visit to Georgetown.

“I really wanted to visit The Exorcist house and Georgetown. I just found it really, really inspiring,” he told Nikki Schwab and Tara Palermi. “People think I’m absolutely crazy saying all this.”

McPherson and Eclipse star Ciarán Hinds visited the Exorcist stairs before the movie’s special screening in D.C. at the Georgetown AMC on Tuesday, too.

Hinds, an “oh right, that guy” actor slated to play Dumbledore’s brother in the remaining Harry Potter films, was impressed.

“It just takes you right up in a very strange gray-lit area up there.”